optimization

I just wrote a new article called How I Survived a 2300% Traffic Increase With Drupal. It documents my experience with hitting the front page of Reddit, and some of the steps I took to make sure my site stayed online.

I also included some nice traffic graphs and statistics. If you ever wondered what kind of numbers to expect from a front-page link on a big social news site, be sure to check it out.

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John Forsythe

I'm assuming it's too late, but if not here's an easy performance win for D6:

http://drupal.org/node/215080

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blockquote>The type column of the {system} table is currently a varchar(255) field. Yet in 99% of all Drupal installations it stores either the text 'module' or the text 'theme' and nothing else. This is already a strong case for making it an int column and defining constants for module and theme. Then, on every page, there is this query:
SELECT filename FROM system WHERE name = 'user' AND type = 'module';

OpenCraft hosted a 3.5 hour seminar that I presented on Drupal performance tuning and optimization. You can find the slides from the presentation there, which can be useful to some of you.

In case you have not seen it, there are a bunch of articles on Drupal performance tuning and optimization at 2bits.com.

According to my devel module logs and lots of watching the query lists, the query that costs us the most in all of Drupal core is this one:

SELECT DISTINCT b.* FROM blocks b LEFT JOIN blocks_roles r ON b.module = r.module AND b.delta = r.delta WHERE b.theme = S AND b.status = D

Let the brainstorming begin; what can we do to improve it? Are there enough indexes? Can we avoid the DISTINCT? Are there other options?